January 3, 2011
The six useful things you can do with analytic technology
I seem to be in the mode of sharing some of my frameworks for thinking about analytic technology. Here’s another one.
Ultimately, there are six useful things you can do with analytic technology:
- You can make an immediate decision.
- You can plan in support of future decisions.
- You can research, investigate, and analyze in support of future decisions.
- You can monitor what’s going on, to see when it necessary to decide, plan, or investigate.
- You can communicate, to help other people and organizations do these same things.
- You can provide support, in technology or data gathering, for one of the other functions.
Technology vendors often cite similar taxonomies, claiming to have all the categories (as they conceive them) nicely represented, in slickly integrated fashion. They exaggerate. Most of these categories are in rapid flux, and the rest should be. Analytic technology still has a long way to go.
In more detail:
- You can make an immediate decision.
- The decision can be made by:
- A machine, and then also executed by a machine, for example in:
- Web site personalization.
- Algorithmic trading.
- Network security and/or load balancing.
- A machine, and then executed by a human, for example in a call center.
- A human looking at a machine.
- This case can be a lot slower than the others.
- Analytic-operational app integration can be a special case of this, but progress is slow — today’s reality resembles what I proposed in a 2004 white paper.
- A machine, and then also executed by a machine, for example in:
- Technologies supporting immediate decision making include:
- SQL, most commonly.
- Extensions that are getting added into SQL DBMS, such as in-database model scoring.
- Other search and query languages.
- Complex event processing (CEP), whether rules-based or SQL-like.
- Other rules engines, rarely.
- The decision can be made by:
- You can plan in support of future decisions.
- Technologies that support planning include:
- Microsoft Excel, first and foremost.
- Budget-centric tools.
- Forecasting.
- Planning hasn’t advanced as well as one would have hoped.
- The integration of planning and business intelligence has been uninspiring, a couple years of aggressive marketing last decade — especially by Cognos — notwithstanding.
- Specialty planning languages always seem to disappoint. River Logic is a small vendor with a great idea — which it hasn’t advanced rapidly since the 1990s. This is sadly typical.
- One bright spot, however, has been demand forecasting.
- Technologies that support planning include:
- You can research, investigate, and analyze in support of future decisions.
- I’ve just started calling this area investigative analytics.
- In doing so, I am conflating several disciplines:
- Statistics, data mining, machine learning, and/or predictive analytics. (Note: I can’t get excited about the distinctions between those closely overlapping technology categories — apologies to Sam Madden and others who do seem to care.)
- The more research-oriented aspects of business intelligence tools:
- Ad-hoc query.
- Drilldown.
- Most things done by BI-using “business analysts.”
- Most things within BI called “data exploration.”
- Analogous technologies as applied to non-tabular data types such as text or graph.
- There’s a lot further to go.
- It’s still very early days for in-database analytic technology.
- Any two of statistics, business intelligence, and text analytics could be much better integrated with each other than they are.
- You can monitor what’s going on, to see when it necessary to decide, plan, or investigate.
- The guts of business intelligence — reports and dashboards — are really monitoring tools.
- Monitoring is the jumping-off point for a lot of decision making, planning, and investigation. First you notice the anomaly or need, then you set out to do something about it.
- I think this technology could use a lot of improvement.
- You can communicate, to help other people and organizations do these same things.
- Since the dawn of reporting, reports have used as much to communicate among colleagues as they have to truly support personal decision-making.
- BI vendors have done decent jobs in recent years of advancing the communication aspects of BI, in two respects:
- General share-ability of reports and the like.
- Stakeholder-facing BI.
- But more profound BI-centric collaboration is advancing too slowly.
- You can provide support, in technology or data gathering, for one of the other functions.
- Well, duh. That’s most of what I write about in this blog, especially in the areas of DBMS and ETL/ELT/ETLT.
Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Cognos, Data warehousing, RDF and graphs, Text
Subscribe to our complete feed!
Comments
13 Responses to “The six useful things you can do with analytic technology”
Leave a Reply
Curt,
This is a great list. I would like to add, though, context accumulation under the heading of ‘immediate decision.’
Context accumulation is a relatively new area, and encompasses many of the technologies you’ve referenced above but focuses on machine learning as applied to streaming data. I think we’ll see more systems making decisions, in real time, based upon deeper analytics than previously done with CEP ‘engines’ this year.
I’ll be talking more about context accumulation this year and demonstrating some real life use-cases at a few up-coming conferences.
Colin
Hi Colin,
Yep, that’s where it would go in the taxonomy. 😉
Best,
CAM
[…] DBMS2 lists off 6 things to do with analytics. […]
[…] The six useful things you can do with analytic #BI technology Ultimately, there are six useful things you can do with analytic technology:* You can make an immediate decision. * You can plan in support of future decisions. * You can research, investigate, and analyze in support of future decisions. * You can monitor what’s going on, to see when it necessary to decide, plan, or investigate. * You can communicate, to help other people and organizations do these same things. * You can provide support, in technology or data gathering, for one of the other functions. […]
[…] to DBMS2, there are six useful things you can do with analytic […]
[…] recently coined the phrase investigative analytics to […]
[…] however, is the more technical list of six things you can do with analytic technology, taken from a blog post late last year. Also unaltered are my definitions of investigative […]
[…] evolved: OLTP for the former, and OLAP for the latter, although terminology around analytics is less well-defined, including data warehousing, business intelligence, data mining, and others. From this we got […]
[…] evolved: OLTP for the former, and OLAP for the latter, although terminology around analytics is less well-defined, including data warehousing, business intelligence, data mining, and others. From this we got […]
[…] The guys at Monash Research believes that there are ultimately six useful things you can do with analytics technology. […]
[…] The guys at Monash Research believes that there are ultimately six useful things you can do with analytics technology. […]
[…] http://www.dbms2.com/2011/01/03/the-six-useful-things-you-can-do-with-analytic-technology/ (advantage) […]
[…] The guys at Monash Research believes that there are ultimately six useful things you can do with analytics technology. […]